Amazon.com: Favourite Cello Concertos: Jacqueline du PrÃ©: MP3 Downloads TITLE added to MP3 cart Favourite Cello Concertos MP3 Music, January 27, 1990 $23.99 Your Amazon Music account is currently associated with a different marketplace. To enjoy Prime Music, go to Your Music Library and transfer your account to Amazon.com (US). Fix in Music Library 12:17 Album Only Sold by Amazon Digital Services LLC. Additional taxes may apply. By placing your order, you agree to our Terms of Use . Popular Albums Original Release Date: October 1, 1989 Release Date: January 27, 1990 Number of Discs: 3 Copyright: (C) 1989 EMI Records Ltd. Record Company Required Metadata: Music file metadata contains unique purchase identifier. Learn more . Total Length: 3:40:32 By Donna N., Huntersville, NC on September 15, 2013 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase Actually, this was purchased for my husband who has recently come to enjoy cello music.

This set includes several of his favorites and some 'new' pieces with which he was unfamiliar. Jacqueline du Pre was such a marvelously talented musician. You can feel her love for the instrument and the music she is playing. Even though the cello is not my 'instrument of preference' I have enjoyed this collection, as well. If you were to only have one representative cello recording in your collection, you cannot go wrong with this one! By joyous1 on April 29, 2015 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase I bought this particular recording at a trusted friend's recommendation and I bought Yo Yo Ma's recording at the same time so I could compare the difference in the style of these two artists, particularly for the Dvorak and Elgar concertos. While Ma's rendering is smooth and sweeping, I could hear the energy and passion that Du Pre expressed in her version. Both are excellent and I will enjoy listening to these concerto's for years to come. By Lachlan Mason on October 8, 2014 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase This is exquisite playing.

Jacqueline du Pre is incredibly dexterous and engages in a kind of musical vision as she draws both beauty and richness from her cello. The orchestral support she receives is simply wonderful. If you love intensity and texture in technique and interpretation, this brilliant album conveys her own pleasure in the music, and in the instrument, as virtuosity teems from her bow. This is great! By Peter J. Ceccarelli on May 5, 2011 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase If you've ever heard any other artist perform the Dvorak Cello Concerto and then listen to Dupre perform it, there is no comparison. It's amazing how she was able to literally exude the music from her body, and then through her cello. It's breathtaking and moving. There are many parts in the Dvorak concerto that when they crescendo it moves one to tears. She was a gift from somewhere else in the universe and there's been none like her since. Read more 0Comment | 2 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes No Report abuse By Cliff Cox on November 30, 2014 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase Can't say enough about her playing and interpretation with Barenboim. Listened to the Mazur/Ma recording of the Dvorak as well, and I don't like it nearly as much as I do the du Pre version (and I'm a big Ma fan). Even with the recording quality issues. By James on April 3, 2007 Format: Audio CD|Verified Purchase UNTIL I was fortunate enough to have heard them performed by Jacqueline du Pre!!! ABSOLUTELY STUNNING!!! Her superb playing, along with truly masterful interpretative skills, just "comes pouring out of the speakers!" Also, the orchestras were obviously truly inspired by these opportunities to perform and record with one of the greatest musicians of all time. The sound quality is excellent, as is the separation and clarity of both the soloist's and orchestral performances. The overall dynanism is also top notch - I found I had to lower the volume substantially from my normal system loudness levels.

I've enjoyed this set so much I'll probably wind up buying everything from Amazon that EMI has produced with Jacqueline du Pre's name on it! THE IMMORTALS: Jacqueline du Pré - The Amati Magazine The Amati Magazine THE IMMORTALS: Jacqueline du Pré Jacqueline du Pré. Photo: Allegro Films Jacqueline du Pré was the most naturally gifted cellist of her generation. Throughout a professional career lasting just twelve years, her incandescent playing held audiences spellbound. ‘I could see her remarkable gift on the very first day,’ recalled her ‘cello daddy’ William Pleeth, ‘and as the next few lessons unfolded one could see that one had endlessness and that everything was possible.’ Tragically, at the very height of her powers, du Pré’s unique talent was cruelly silenced by the onset of multiple sclerosis. Having hit the ground running in 1961 with a sensational Wigmore Hall debut, her valiant struggles with compromised sensory and motor control during a performance of Brahms’s Double Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman in February 1973 left her with little choice but to retire. She was just 28 years old.

Du Pré’s talent was nurtured initially by her pianist-composer mother, Iris. In Jackie’s hands the cello became a natural extension of her inner being, without any sense of a barrier between player and instrument. So intuitive was her flair for the cello and so insatiable her musical instincts that she got by with the minimum of practice. On first seeing her play, Sir John Barbirolli (a notable cellist himself) turned to viola legend Lionel Tertis and commented excitedly ‘this is it!’ Fortunately the BBC captured her on film aged 17 (accompanied by Iris) at the start of her professional career in three repertoire standards: Mendelssohn’s Op.109 Song without Words, Gaspar Cassadó’s arrangement of the Intermezzo from Granados’s Goyescas and Saint-Saëns’s Allegro Appassionato Op.43. Already notable is the uncluttered freshness of Du Pré’s vision, free of furrowed-brow formality and activated by a sleight-of-hand more usually associated with the violin.

If the prevailing tendency of the time was towards emphasising the cello’s bass-baritonal resonance, du Pré plays with a litheness and tenor-orientated ardency that intensifies the music’s expressive profiling. That same sense of ingenuousness, of an emotional narrative unhampered by stylistic rhetoric, is also notable in a BBC recording of Bach’s D minor Cello Suite taped the following year. In a piece ripe for semantic rumination, she plays the opening Prelude as if it was floating on air. Jacqueline Du Pre – Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1008 (1999 – Remaster): Prélude Following her extensive training with Pleeth, du Pré was mentored by three cello legends: Paul Tortelier (whose inspirational spontaneity made a lasting impact), Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich. Meanwhile, following a highly successful album of short encore pieces, EMI signed her up and in January 1965 she recorded the Delius Concerto with Sir Malcolm Sargent and the Royal Philharmonic as the perfect 20th birthday celebration.

The music’s rhapsodic stream-of-consciousness proved an ideal temperamental match, as witness her exultant phrasing throughout the reflective Lento section, made all the more ravishing by the soulful tone of her 1712 Stradivarius cello, recently bequeathed her by an anonymous benefactor. Jacqueline du Pré/Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Malcolm Sargent – Cello Concerto (1995 – Remaster): Allegramente Initially EMI played it safe, giving the rest of the album over to choral-orchestral Delius (the Songs of Farewell and A Song Before Sunrise) and then repeated the ploy the following August by coupling the Elgar Concerto (this time alongside Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony) with mezzo-soprano Janet Baker’s ravishing account of the song cycle Sea Pictures. In the event they needn’t have worried. Du Pré invests Elgar’s characteristic noble restraint with a scorching imperativeness that had the critics (mostly) in raptures. Living for the moment rather than the half-hour, she take her listeners on a tantalising emotional roller-coaster ride of bracing eloquence.

Although naturally shy, such was du Pré’s uncontainable enthusiasm for life that she created the impression of a charismatic whirlwind. It was during the winter of 1966 that she got to know the young Argentinean pianist Daniel Barenboim, and within no time they began working their way through vast swathes of the cello literature. ‘She had a capacity to imagine sound such I have never met in any other musician,’ Barenboim later recalled. ‘She really was a child of nature – a musician of nature with an unerring instinct…She did not know what it was to have technical difficulties, know what it meant to play safe.’ According to celebrated film-maker Christopher Nupen, who captured their burgeoning relationship on film, it was while working on the Brahms F major Sonata that they fell in love. The sense of two people whose lives had become inextricably entwined was movingly captured by the cameras as they rehearsed and recorded the majestic opening movement in 1968.

From then on there was no stopping this inspired musical partnership – they had married the previous year following du Pré’s conversion to Judaism – enshrined in contemporaneous accounts of Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and concertos by Schumann, Haydn (in C), Boccherini (à la Grützmacher) and Saint-Saëns (in A minor). The latter became something of a speciality and gave rise to one of the most spectacular pieces of cello playing ever caught on film as she launches into the opening bars in Nupen’s 1967 documentary study, preceded by a short piece of footage that encapsulates her captivating personality as she accompanies herself (pizzicato) singing during a train journey to Gatwick Airport. Here one can witness at close quarters the extraordinary symbiosis that existed between du Pré’s right and left hands, the timing immaculate as each change in bow pressure, speed and angle is matched by intuitive micro-inflections of left-hand finger-pressure and pace/width of vibrato. The following year she and her new husband collaborated with the New Philharmonia in an unforgettable studio recording of this very same piece.

New Philharmonia Orchestra/Jacqueline du Pré/Daniel Barenboim – Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op.33 (2000 – Remaster): I. Allegro non troppo – Yet despite her outsize musical personality, Du Pré was also an inspired chamber musician who worked alongside some of the finest musicians of her age. One of the memorable features of these musical encounters was the way her natural exuberance inspired the entire ensemble to produce their very best, leaving Barenboim to pull in the structural reins and ensure the long-term view was sustained convincingly.

Thankfully Nupen was on hand to film two classic Du Pré chamber performances: a delectable 1969 performance of Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Piano Quintet recorded live in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Barenboim, violinist Itzhak Perlman, Zukerman and (on double bass!) Zubin Mehta…… ..….and a 1970 account of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Piano Trio with Zukerman and Barenboim, recorded under studio conditions in the Church of St John’s Smiths Square, captured at the same time this iconic team were recording the complete trios and cello sonatas for EMI: At first all seemed well, judging by a vibrant (if indifferently engineered) 1970 recording of the Dvořák Concerto made with Barenboim in Chicago, and the following year an impassioned coupling of the Chopin and Franck sonatas that would turn out (little did she know it at the time) to be her last studio recording. Soon afterwards she began suffering strange sensations in her fingers, an encroaching numbness that within 18 months rendered her incapable of performing.

Wheelchair-bound and reliant on others for her care, she reflected in 1978 that ‘my hands no longer worked. I simply couldn’t feel the strings.’ Du Pré passed away in October 1987, aged 42, her spirit undimmed by the appalling tragedy of her situation and leaving behind her a treasurable legacy of recordings. She could wish for no finer musical epitaph than a 1967 filmed performance she made with the LSO and Barenboim of the work with which her name became virtually synonymous: the Elgar Concerto. 1000+ images about Jacqueline Du Pre on Pinterest | Wonder woman, London and Conductors Critic Ted Libbey and radio host Fred Child recommend 50 recordings any fanatic or first-timer should not be without. Cellist Jacqueline Du Pre records Elgar's Cello Concerto with conductor John Barbirolli at Kingsway Hall in London, 1965. See More Jacqueline du Pré | Biography & History | AllMusic google+ Artist Biography by Blair Johnston Her story is one of the most legendary of all twentieth century musicians' stories, and also, one of the most tragic.

Cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, born on January 26, 1945, in Oxford, England, to Derek and Iris Du Pré. (Despite the family name, Derek Du Pré was not French, but rather of British Channel Island ancestry; he could trace his lineage back to the Norman Conquest). She blossomed young and achieved international fame in a few short years during the mid-1960s, during which same time she joined Daniel Barenboim in one of history's most celebrated musical marriages. But her career was shattered in the early 1970s -- not even a decade into its maturity -- by multiple sclerosis. It was through her mother Iris, a pianist and teacher, that young Jacqueline was first introduced to music. She was given a cello at age four, began lessons with Alison Dalrymple at the London Violoncello School some months later, and by age ten was studying with William Pleeth , eventually enrolling as his student at London's Guildhall School of Music. While at Guildhall she was the recipient of virtually all the school's internal awards and recognitions, meanwhile taking lessons with Pablo Casals in Switzerland and Paul Tortelier in Paris.

Graduating from Guildhall in 1960, she began to make her first true professional appearances, appearing with the BBC Orchestra in 1961 and performing the Elgar concerto at Wigmore Hall in London that same year, playing on a 1672 Antonio Stradivarius cello presented to her by an anonymous patron. Further concert appearances and, in particular, a series of recordings quickly established her as the premiere young cellist of her generation, and, in many minds, the premiere British-born performer to have appeared in many generations. In 1964, she was given the Davidoff Stradivarius (now in the possession of Yo-Yo Ma ), and it was with this instrument that she made her Carnegie Hall debut on May 14, 1965. She engaged in further studies with Mstislav Rostropovich around that same time, even taking the final examination at the Moscow Conservatory in 1966 -- the same year she met Daniel Barenboim , whom she married the following June.

Du Pré 's personal and professional relationship with Barenboim opened up whole new opportunities for chamber music experience, and her collaborations with such up-and-coming luminaries as Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman sold thousands of both recordings and tickets (and, eventually, videos). In 1971, Du Pré began to feel that all was not well with her body and, thus, her playing, and she took the entirety of the following year off. In 1973 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and, except for a pair of performances that year and some sonata recordings ( Chopin and Franck), her career as a performer was over. She remained active as a teacher, however, for many years afterwards. In 1976, she was awarded the O.B.E., and in 1982 she was named Musician of the Year by the Incorporated Society of Musicians. She passed away on October 19, 1987, at the age of 42. Jacqueline Du Pré's physical gift for her instrument was prodigious; but it was her sheer joy in music making that endeared her to the world's audiences.

Although some found her physical involvement during performance distasteful, few could find reason to complain about the sonic result. The scintillating, rapturous tone she produced was positively intoxicating, and remains so today through recordings. Her renditions of the Elgar and Dvorák concertos, and of the Schumann concerto, are especially beloved. How Jacqueline du Pré Sparked a Cello Explosion – Strings Magazine S L July 16, 2012 50 years after her London debut, EMI Reissues her complete recorded works—friends and colleagues marvel at her legacy. by Laurence Vittes It’s easy to feel sorry for the late cellist Jacqueline du Pré—after all, she was struck down at the height of her career by multiple sclerosis. But then you miss the point. Disregard everything you’ve ever heard about her being a saint or an angel, which she would have been the first to dispute. And set aside the portrayal of du Pré as a devilishly difficult ingenue as depicted in her sister Hilary’s controversial book, A Genius in the Family, and Anand Tucker’s prickly 1998 film adaptation Hilary and Jackie.

Instead, start from this simple point: she was a cello-playing force of nature with few musical inhibitions, who also was very pretty, and very, very smart. EMI recently reissued du Pré’s complete recordings. And earlier this year, she was voted into the first Gramophone Hall of Fame. Twenty-five years after her tragic, untimely death in 1987, at age 42, du Pré continues to capture the admiration—and imagination—of friends, colleagues, and a new generation of fans and followers. “I listened to and watched every bit of footage on her before I was 10 years old,” cellist and 2011 MacArthur Fellow Alisa Weilerstein, 29, says. The Dutch cellist Jan Vogler, known for his own energetic performances, is inspired by du Pré’s “energy and willingness to invest herself beyond comfort and secure control. She inspired me to take risks,” he says. “I felt ashamed when I was once not totally exhausted after a concert.

It seemed that music deserved and required this input and anything less seemed to be cheating!” In the 1960s, du Pré rose meteorically to fame along with the Beatles—her crowd was as much rock ’n’ roll as classical music. Indeed, she had been groomed for stardom by the entire British musical establishment. Born in Oxford, England, in 1945, she seemed destined for greatness. Legend has it that at age four du Pré heard a cello on the radio and asked her mother for one. A year later, Sir John Barbirolli, the great English conductor and cellist, heard du Pré play and said, “This is it!” She started studying with the renowned cellist William Pleeth at age ten, won the Gold Medal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama at 15, and studied with Pablo Casals at a master class held in Zermatt, Switzerland, before being taught by both Paul Tortelier and Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1961, she made her formal debut at the age of 16 at London’s Wigmore Hall.

She followed that the next year with her debut at the Royal Festival Hall playing the Elgar Cello Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Rudolf Schwarz. She soon became an international soloist. Offstage, she was outgoing, convivial, and irreverent. Onstage, she was supremely confident and concentrated, admired for her seemingly effortless technique, and adored for the intense emotional connection she made with her audiences. The BBC high brass decided to make her their franchise player and enlisted her to record her entire repertoire—from Haydn to Schumann, from soup to nuts, and above all, the signature Elgar Cello Concerto—for British flagship label EMI. After a 1965 performance of the Elgar work, New York Times reviewer Raymond Ericson wrote that “Miss du Pré and the concerto seemed made for each other, because her playing was so completely imbued with the romantic spirit. Her tone was sizable and beautifully burnished.

Her technique was virtually flawless, whether she was playing the sweeping chords that open the concerto, sustaining a ravishing pianissimo tone, or keeping the fast repeated note figures in the scherzo going at an even pace.” But the defining moment in du Pré’s career came in 1966 at a New Year’s Eve party in London when she and the handsome, gifted Argentine pianist Daniel Barenboim met over Brahms’ F major Sonata and fell irretrievably in love. Six months later, she converted to Judaisim and the couple married at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He has written that she was “an extremely kind person who could be quite hard in her judgment of other musicians when it concerned lack of commitment or intensity, or what was considered lack of honesty. And anyone who was not willing to give all of himself was a dishonest person.” The first recordings the couple made together in 1967 were the Haydn C major and Boccherini cello concertos. “She had a capacity to imagine sound such as I never met in any other musician,” Barenboim has written. “She was really a child of nature—a musician of nature with an unerring instinct.” The duo was a hit.

The effect on the British public of this impossibly romantic, classical-music soap opera was total—the relationship turned the two stars into the golden couple of the musical world of their day. When doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis in 1972, a year after she had begun to lose feeling in her fingers at age 26, the public’s devastation and sorrow ran deep. Her last public concerts took place in New York in February 1973, completing three of four scheduled performances of the Brahms Double Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman and Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Isaac Stern stepped in to cover that last cancelled concert, performing Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. “My hands no longer worked,” she said in a 1978 interview. “I simply couldn’t feel the strings.” Her professional decline was rapid: du Pré had a severe case of MS, and although she remained a revered figure and continued teaching for years from her wheelchair, she could no longer perform. She remained in London while Barenboim settled in Paris to conduct.

She grew increasingly frustrated and angry as she became wracked with pain, lost control of her speech and motor skills, and became almost totally dependent on others for her care. Although she relied heavily on visitors for her emotional survival, many of her colleagues were uncomfortable seeing her in such a deteriorating state. Yet, despite her illness, du Pré remained devoted to music and took great comfort from it. “I had to learn to reconstruct my life,” she said in 1978, according to theNew York Times. “But I have found a great deal to do. I go to concerts and see my friends. And the music is still alive in my head.” The National Multiple Sclerosis Society, in conjunction with the Jacqueline du Pré Research Fund, presented several benefit concerts for du Pré at Carnegie Hall. Participants included violinist Pinchas Zukerman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Eugene Istomin, and several others. In his review in the New York Times of a 1980 benefit concert, John Rockwell wrote: “The consistently high quality of these particular benefits can be traced to the close professional and social circle in which Miss du Pré and her husband move.

They know the best, and the best play at their benefits.” In 1981, the Broadway play “Duet for One,” by Tom Kempinski and starring Anne Bancroft and Max von Sydow, told du Pré’s story. In her obituary, the Times noted that throughout her illness, du Pré remained sanguine about the future. “Nobody knows if I’ll ever regain mobility,” she had said in 1978. “It could be that next week I’ll find myself walking down the road. I believe in realistic optimism, but not wishful thinking.” To celebrate the 50th anniversary of her public London debut with the Elgar concerto, for which she received a special 1977 BRIT Award for best classical soloist album of the previous 25 years, EMI has reissued a newly packaged 17-CD box set of her complete recordings, with all the concertos, sonatas, and chamber music, from the early glimpses of her talent in bloom to her most mature work. There is just one previously unreleased track: Bach’s Adagio and Allegro, BWV 1028.

“She did not know what it was to have technical difficulties, nor what it meant to play safe,” Barenboim writes of du Pré in his 1991 autobiography, A Life in Music. “There was a sensation of pure abandon when she played and it was that quality that endeared her to her colleagues and to her audience. There was something in her playing that was so completely and inevitably right—as far as tempo and dynamics were concerned. She played with great rubato, with great freedom, but it was so convincing that you felt like a mere mortal faced with somebody who possessed some kind of ethereal dimension. “Musically speaking, she was something of a rebel—she had her own brand of obstinacy. There was something deep inside her personality or her charisma, but the intensity of her feeling that made you wonder if there could be, after all, some valid reason for changing the printed score! With other musicians, one would have felt that such a reaction was willful or capricious, but there was nothing willful or capricious about Jacqueline’s music making.” No wonder, her larger-than-life persona casts a shadow even on today’s concert stages.

With each passing year, her musical presence becomes bigger than the jet-set superstars she once traveled with. Her influence has been, as the British cellist and pedagogue Colin Carr puts it, “enormous.” That sentiment is echoed by English cellist Natalie Clein. “When I was 10, she was the first and only female cellist I had heard of,” Clein says, “a strong, charismatic woman with a sense of joy in her playing.” Cypress String Quartet cellist Jennifer Kloetzel admits that “being a blond female cellist growing up at a certain time, I fell in love with Jackie the rock-star legend.” And equally with the way du Pré made music. “She got it inside it and devoured it,” Kloetzel says. Ask Vogler to describe du Pré’s performance style and he notes that “she was like a hurricane on the cello, very different from the pure power of Rostropovich.

Her playing was positive and enthusiastic—it was an authentic expression of the young postwar generation in the West.” Du Pré’s former teacher William Pleeth remains the cellist’s most important influence, a virtuoso who morphed into a teacher whose focus on freedom and spontaneity aligned with du Pré’s inner emotional core. Her ability to immediately adapt to whatever changes and adjustments she might be making in tempo or phrasing and still maintain the connection she had with the musical experience was a theme he expressed over and again. Du Pré was so well prepared by Pleeth that by the time she arrived in Moscow in 1966 and played Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante for Rostropovich, the master quickly began treating the student as an equal. “The rapport between Jackie and Rostropovich,” the Russian-Armenian cellist Karine Georgian, a longtime student of Rostropovich, says, “was like electricity.

Whenever she would begin to play over the top, Rostropovich would suggest a correction in her conceptual thinking, which she would immediately accept and incorporate without losing either her expressivity or her connection with the musical line and experience for even one beat.” Georgian will “never, never forget” du Pré playing the beginning of the Franck Sonata, noting that “her urge to express what she felt about it could be quite forceful. Her use of rubato, rhythm, and timing in the Franck was something very rare, something you cannot teach. The expressivity came not just from the bow, but from the left hand as well and every finger on the fingerboard.” The master classes that du Pré gave after she was forced by multiple sclerosis to stop playing the cello represent a voluminous and complex treasure trove of resources for cellists and other musicians.

While she may have been an incandescent musical force of nature—comparable, some say, to the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich—du Pré brought to her teaching what British cellist and former Pleeth student Paul Watkins, newly appointed to the Emerson String Quartet, calls “a huge intellectual and imaginative grasp.” During Robert Cohen’s studies with du Pré, she passed to him “her powerful belief that not a moment, not a millisecond of the music can be overlooked or undervalued. This was examined in microscopic detail. Creating and treasuring every sound produced from the cello was a life force for her and a focus I incorporated in my playing—as every good teacher desires—in my own way.” Studying with du Pré was an intense experience, and not always a pleasant one. The Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen, who studied with du Pré at age 18, says that the fact that “playing through students was the only way left of making music for her made the relationship almost unbearably difficult to deal with. Playing in front of her, trying desperately to play just like her and failing miserably, I felt more and more at a dead end.

“After maybe ten lessons, I had to ask her if I could go on visiting her without the cello.” Another master-class student of hers, Torleif Thedéen, also felt that du Pré “wanted to play through me—use this fingering, make this slide there, get closer to the bridge.” For the then 18-year-old Thedéen, it was a “very heavy responsibility.” And these days, she is still teaching us: watching video footage of du Pré performing is a remarkable learning experience, her expressivity flowing from both the bow and the left hand, and from her physical freedom and movement. The leading edge of du Pré’s dominance will always be her relationship with Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. It came at a time when the stereo format was breaking sales records, and the Beatles were breaking them, too. And classical music was coming along for the ride. Ironically, du Pré, with her larger-than-life embrace, significantly redefined the character of the music to such an extent that the version recorded by Elgar himself with Beatrice Harrison, the concerto’s early champion, has become unrecognizable.

Notably, the wild fury of Harrison’s accelerando in m. 12 of the second movement cadenza has been lost in favor of a studied declamation that the composer might well have deplored. “The fact that many cellists have taken her wonderful and unique performance of the Elgar Concerto as gospel, wanting to copy different aspects of it,” Anssi Karttunen cautions, “has made a caricature of the piece. If one wants proof of that, all one needs to do is to listen to Beatrice Harrison’s recording with Elgar conducting, from 1928, and compare it to any performance from the last 20 years [post du Pré]. It’s hard to believe that one is listening to the same piece.” The current generation of star cellists doesn’t shy away from the du Pré effect. For instance, Clein calls the first generation after du Pré “a creative burst, a cello population explosion, with them, in turn, becoming great teachers themselves as well as players.” She feels that this is how du Pré’s legacy is being carried on. Cohen believes that du Pré’s legacy lies in the extraordinary emotional energy she transmitted to her audience.

“Even now,” he says, “people talk to me in words of extraordinary elation about the unforgettable experience of hearing her play, perhaps even 30 years ago. This is how Jackie’s legacy really lives on, and in the musicians who are inspired by her playing. ” For Karttunen, neither the instrument, the technique, nor the particular music du Pré played sum up her tale: “The point was that she told a story of her life with everything she did with the cello and laid it out in front of us in total sincerity,” he says. “There are only a few artists every century for which everything around them becomes material for their own story. I think music and the cello were the perfect, and only, ways she had of truly expressing herself.” What Jacqueline du Pre Played Jacqueline du Pré played several instruments in her youth, including an early 1673 Stradivari (more on that in a moment), a Guarneri, a Ruggieri, and a Tecchler.

When du Pré was 16, her godmother Ismena Holland purchased, for $90,000, the 1712 “Davidoff” (or “Davydov”) Stradivari. It is almost identical to the “Duport” Strad, built on Strad’s highly coveted B Form. Most of du Pré’s recordings from 1965–68 reportedly were made on the Davidoff. She eventually became disillusioned with the instrument, which she said was overly sensitive to weather changes, and switched to a 1970 Peresson that was a gift from Barenboim. Du Pré’s 1970 Peresson cello is on loan to cellist Kyril Zlotnikov of the Jerusalem Quartet. In 1988, the Vuitton Foundation purchased the Davidoff cello for just over £1 million and made it available on loan to Yo-Yo Ma, who still uses it today as one of his two main instruments.

In an interview with du Pré biographer Elizabeth Wilson, Yo-Yo Ma said: “Jackie’s unbridled dark qualities went against the ‘Davydov.’ You have to coax the instrument. The more you attack it, the less it returns.” In 1984, Lynn Harrell purchased the aforementioned 1673 Strad cello. In 2004, he left the instrument in a New York City taxi. The cab driver, Mohamed Ibrahim, returned the cello unharmed. Two years later, it was sold to Russian cellist Nina Kotova, who now owns it (though Harrell reportedly has taken legal steps to rename the instrument the “du Pré” Stradivari). —Greg Cahill Jacqueline du Pre's - Musical Stories | CD | ABC Shop Jacqueline du Pre's - Musical Stories Do not fill in this field Please enter your details below to post your review. * How do you rate this item using a scale of 1 to 5?

* Your reviews will be posted within five to seven business days Submissions that do not follow our review guidelines will not be posted Your email address will not be published, and if supplied, will be used only for the purpose of contacting you about your review. Please refer to the ABC Privacy Policy to see how we use personal information CD Add Jacqueline du Pre's - Musical Storiesto cart Add to Cart Description In 1979, the much-loved British cellist jacqueline du pré, then beset with multiple sclerosis (she was diagnosed in 1973), stepped into the recording studio to make what was to be her last recording – not as cellist, but as an engaging narrator in peter and the wolf. Her husband daniel barenboim conducted a spacious and relaxed account of this timeless story. The coupling was an expanded version of the movements that are frequently heard as leopold mozart’s toy symphony – the cassation in g. Her spirit ever indomitable, du pré had actually taken part in performances of this work in 1976 at the royal albert hall, playing a toy drum.

(earlier, as a little girl, she performed it with much enthusiasm on a television show, managing to rupture the instrument!). 6 videos of Jacqueline du Pré as you’ve never seen her before - Classic FM Classic FM 6 videos of Jacqueline du Pré as you’ve never seen her before 18 May 2015, 14:33 This year would have been the 70th birthday of the brilliant cellist. Here are some videos that remind us of her enchanting personality. Jacqueline du Pré was one of the greatest cellists of all time. Her tragic illness and early death – at the age of just 42 – brought an end to one of the shortest but brightest careers the music world has ever seen. Below are a series of videos of the great cellist, as you don't normally see her – backstage, messing around, joking with her colleagues – filmed by Christopher Nupen. You can see more of Christopher's work on his YouTube channel, Allegro Films – and there's a rare chance to catch a screening of his film The Trout, with an introduction by the film-maker himself, in the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room on 6 March. Find out more here.

Swapping the cello for the violin In this rarely seen backstage footage, Du Pré swaps instruments with violinist Itzhak Perlman – and they proceed to have a fair bash at playing them. With pretty hilarious results – we could be wrong, but we’re not sure that’s how you’re supposed to hold a violin. Playing around on the piano This black and white footage shows Du Pré messing around on the piano in a break during a recording session while chatting to pianist Daniel Barenboim, who later became her husband. Cello… or bongos? There’s a glimpse of Du Pré’s famous joie de vivre at the beginning of this clip, as she turns the cello into something more like a percussion instrument… Jackie at home Catch a clip of Du Pré singing to herself on a train journey as part of this documentary from 1967 – which also includes interviews with the great musician and her parents. Turning her hand to the piano Watched over by Barenboim, Du Pré turns her hand to the piano – and is amazing at it.

A glimpse into rehearsal Four of the best classical musicians of all time rehearse Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet – Daniel Barenboim (piano), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Jacqueline du Pré (cello) and Zubin Mehta (double bass). An amazing moment in musical history. Latest on Classic FM Jacqueline du Pré | Album Discography | AllMusic Jacqueline du Pré Biography by Blair Johnston Du Pré (1945-1987) was a leading performer of the mid-20th century, and the first woman cellist to establish an international career.

Question: Which musical instrument was associated with Jacqueline du Pre?
Answer: Cello